The Last Reunion
by Technomad
Summary: The end of the whole story, decades in the future. This has been bugging me to get it written for a while.


The Last Reunion

a Tomorrow Series fanfic

by Technomad

It was a day of celebration. All across Australia, bonfires blazed in the streets, fireworks lit the sky, bands played, and people danced, sang and rejoiced.

After more than seventy years, Australia was all one country again. The invaders who had come unexpectedly so many years ago had, after losing several bitterly-fought wars, finally been driven from the continent. The last of them, feeling dreadfully hard-done-by, were boarding UN ships to be returned to their lands of origin.

Wirrawee celebrated just like every other Australian city, town and village. There was a parade, many speeches, wreaths laid in the cemetery, and a town-wide fete. As day drew on toward evening, a long limousine with government plates drove through town to a house on the western edge. The limousine stopped, and an old woman got out.

She was old; her face was lined and weathered from decades of Australian sun and wind, and her hair was snow-white. However, she stood tall and straight, albeit with the help of a cane, and her dress uniform tunic gleamed with medals, with the Victoria Cross for Australia first among many. She walked up the path to the house as the front door burst open, and she was swarmed by children.

"Grandma Ellie! Grandma Ellie!"

"Oh, it's good to have you back!"

"How were the ceremonies?"

Ellie laughed and rumpled the children's hair. "Easy, you wild things! Easy! I just got off a plane from Darwin, and I'm still the worse for wear!" She straightened and smiled as her oldest daughter came out. "Corrie? Could you round up the tacker brigade? At least long enough for me to change out of this uniform?"

Corrie Takkam Smith smiled at her mother. "Of course, Mum. Come here, you mob! Let Granny Ellie at least get in and sit down before you crawl all over her!" Once the children had been rounded up and brought under control, mother and daughter clasped hands. "How was the final surrender ceremony, Mum?"

` "Tedious, darling. The rest of the family is here, I take it?"

Corrie nodded. "They've all been here for a day or so. The ones we can't put up are staying at the neighbours'. Everybody understands why the whole family's here." She smiled. "The cooking's been nonstop! We've a huge feast on the way, and were just waiting for you to put the final parts into the ovens." She winked at her mother. "Those who don't want to cook, or wouldn't be much use in cooking, are down at the Yannos' place, except for the tacker brigade. They insisted on being here to welcome you home."

Ellie smiled. "Well, at my age, I don't think anybody would think any the worse of me if I begged off cooking. I'll change into my usual clothes and go sit on the porch for a while."

"Good on you, Mum. I remember when your discharge came through. You said you felt like that bloke in Pilgrim's Progress, when he got close to the Heavenly City and the burden of his sins fell from his back."

Australia had instituted conscription some while after the end of the first war. Even with their records in that war, Ellie had still been called up for service, along with Homer and Fiona Yannos, Kevin Holmes, and Ellie's fiance, Lee Takkam. They had served in the second war, and the third. All of them had been repeatedly awarded medals, including Ellie's Victoria Cross, a belated reward for her role in the destruction of the enemy facilities at Cobbler's Bay.

Kevin had gone first; he'd been in an Army helicopter on what was thought to be a routine patrol, when some enemy soldiers had got in a lucky shot with a ground-to-air missile. Homer was next, which hadn't surprised Ellie. Homer had volunteered for a deep-penetration strike far behind enemy lines, and had come back riddled with bullets, barely hanging on to life; he'd lasted just long enough to say goodbye to Fiona, who'd been rushed from her job in divisional headquarters to say farewell. Fiona had not been the same afterward, and had died about four years previously.

Lee had been badly hurt in an enemy air raid on Stratton. Gavin had pulled him out of a burning building. Lee never really recovered, and had died a year before the final victory, while Gavin had gone in the most ironic way: with his hearing impairment, he hadn't been able to hear the car that ran him down while he crossed the street. _At least,_ Ellie thought mordantly sometimes, _he never knew what hit him_.

Ellie was the only survivor of the old group, and there were times when it grew wearisome, being trotted out on every ANZAC Day and propped up on a platform like some sort of patriotic totem, to listen while some youngster too young to remember the invasion made a speech, or some group of schoolchildren did a recitation.

Even though she was long since retired from the service, she had been expected to put in an appearance at the ceremonies marking the end of the wars, and had stood there, her medals gleaming and the sun blazing off her white hair, while the Australian and enemy representatives signed the peace agreement and formalized the arrangements for the evacuation of the last of the enemy settlers. She had smiled slightly to see the enemy envoys come forward to sign; the expressions of thwarted fury and rage on their faces were like balm to her heart. If only my friends could have been there to see it!

The news was playing on a radio in the house as she went in and changed; the enemy settlers were being rounded up, by force in some cases, and transported to Darwin, which had been the last major Australian city held by their people. The UN had arranged transportation, since Australia itself didn't have enough to do the job, even with everybody who was able to help out volunteering.

Once Ellie was in her comfortable clothes, she went out onto the porch. The radio was repeating some speech from the invaders' home country, about the hardships and difficulties faced by their people, returning to their overcrowded homeland. Many of them had never seen the place, having been born on Australian soil. Ellie smiled. It wasn't a very nice smile.

"Payback comes slowly, but it's a bitch, isn't it?" she murmured.

"What was that, Grandma Ellie?" one of her grandchildren asked.

"Nothing you need to worry about, Chris. I may want to take a nap, so could you and the other little monsters play quietly?"

"Sure thing, Grandma Ellie!" Soon, Ellie's daughters and daughters-in-law came out and herded the children indoors, clucking about Grandma Ellie needing her nap after such a long day.

Alone on the porch, Ellie looked out over the land. The house was on the very edge of Wirrawee, and from where she sat, she could see the bush itself, unchanging and eternal. She thought she could see motion out there, and smiled at the thought that in the old days, that might have told her that her friends were nearby. Her eyes drifted shut…

The next thing she knew, she was looking up at her friends, all of them young and strong and vigorous. One person in particular brought her up out of her chair in a bound. "Corrie!" Ellie shrieked, hugging her dearest friend. "Oh, Corrie, I've missed you so much!"

"And I've missed you!" Laughing, sobbing, the two friends hugged each other hard enough that their ribs creaked. Lee, Kevin, Homer, Gavin and Chris stood by, smiling, while Robyn and Fiona dabbed happy tears from their eyes. When Ellie managed to untangle herself from Corrie, the others all claimed a hug, and for a few minutes, it was a loving scrum before they finally could bring themselves to disengage.

"We've been waiting here for you, Ellie. You were needed so that we could be complete," Lee said, his voice thick with the emotion Australian men usually disdained. "Come on, Ellie! Your mum and dad are waiting to see you, and they want to hear all about their grandchildren and great-grandchildren!"

"They do?" Ellie jumped for joy, hardly noticing how she was doing things she hadn't been able to do in years. Even the old, old injury she'd taken toward the end of the first war had stopped hurting. "Let's go find them!" In a laughing, happy mob, the friends tore off down the road.

Meanwhile, Corrie Takkam Smith had told her daughter: "Go on out and tell Grandma Ellie that dinner's almost ready!" When her daughter came back in, saying "Mum…Grandma Ellie won't wake up!" she knew.

The funeral seemed almost to be part of the celebrations. By the request of the family, it was kept very low-key and private. The Prime Minister and Governor-General both attended, but they had known Ellie for years, and they were treated more as family friends and fellow mourners than as VIPs. The press was kept very firmly away. However, floral tributes came from all over Australia.

The burial was in the Wirrawee Cemetery; Ellie had arranged her own burial at the same time she'd arranged Lee's. They lay side-by-side, under a single headstone, not far from their parents' graves and the graves of those who'd died in the wars. Ellie had asked that her pallbearers be soldiers, and the Australian Army she had served so long had sent its very finest, along with a bugler and an honour guard. After the eulogy, delivered by her last commanding officer, who'd been asked to do so by her family, and the firing of the 21-gun salute, the bugler played _The Last Post_.

Over in the corner of the cemetery, close enough to watch everything but invisible to mortal eyes, Ellie and her friends and parents watched the ceremony. Ellie wept, mostly at seeing her children and grandchildren distressed, and Lee put his arm around her to comfort her.

"Oh, I'm not sad for me," Ellie gasped. "Like the eulogy said, I had a long, very full life, and a gentle death. And now I'm back with you lot, which is all the Heaven I ever wanted." With that, she and the others faded, to go to lands that no living person knows.

THE END


End file.
